


Sandoval Bey's Backstory (2)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [143]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, Internal Corps Politics, Politics, Psi Cops, Psi Corps, Suicide, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-01 06:37:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17239259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Sandoval Bey was Bester's mentor and father figure when he was a teen in the Corps. (This is canon - he's a character in the canon books and was discussed in the unfilmedCrusadescript involving Bester.)Fragments of his backstory are given in canon - I've pulled them together and I'm reconstructing his story, because his life story is, in a sense, the story of a certain era of the Corps. Bey entered the Corps as a teenager, a "later" from the normal world with no connections, yet eventually rose to be head of all of MetaPol under Director Vacit. His eventual assassination at the hands of Psi Corps Director Johnston (Vacit's successor) marked a pivotal moment both in Psi Corps history, and in Bester's life.Part 1 ishere.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	Sandoval Bey's Backstory (2)

**Author's Note:**

> New to _Behind the Gloves_? What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

The next pivotal moment in Bey's life, after his father's assassination, being sent to London, and eventually joining the Corps, was his wife's death.

From the very same paragraph as before:

"Bey's father was Turkish, from the hill country, a poor boy who rose to political prominence. His mother had been the British ambassador to Turkey, and they had lived there until he was six, when his father was murdered by a political dissident. Thereafter, Bey had been raised in London, and had spent long summers with a grandfather who lived near Madrid. He had joined Psi Corps as a teen - Al really wasn't sure exactly when or under what circumstances. He was a widower, and it was a subject he studiously avoided."

So what happened to his wife? He refuses to discuss her (or her death) with students, so obviously this is a very private matter. But what happened?

Again, this takes a bit of careful sleuthing.

There's a _lot_ going on in the scene where Bey has "that talk" with Bester in his office, so I'm just going to address some of here, focusing on one key element, and that is how much Bey _despises_ suicides.

          "Mr. Bester, I have done many scans of the dead and dying. I have likewise, in my time, come upon the scene of a death, many times so close on the heels of the reaper that I could still feel the trace of the dead person, their last thoughts, echoing away. When I come upon the body of someone who has slit their own wrists, swallowed handfuls of pills, hung themselves - when I come upon a suicide, Mr. Bester, do you know what thought I find most often, hanging in the air, glowing for me to see?"

          "No, sir."

          "This will show them. This will show them." He paused and rested his lambent gaze on Al. "Does that sound familiar, Mr. Bester? It should."

"It should," because just the day before, he took on that _exact attitude_ when Bey stopped him from telepathically attacking the students who were mocking him during his "statue time."

          _Do. Not._ It was Bey, probably behind him. Sandoval Bey. Dr. Sandoval Bey, who had scanned him, who - despite his claims - knew nothing of justice but everything about torturing Alfred Bester.

          But he let the attack sigh away. He let the anger form cysts under his flesh. He could dig it out easily enough later. He would show everyone, Bey included. They would all regret treating him this way.

Meanwhile Bey had (unknown to Bester) given him such a harsh and public sentence to appease the director, and _save his life_. The next day, when Bester asks why his punishment had to be so _public_ , and says to Bey "I thought you were my friend," Bey replies, "Al, I am your friend. I'm trying to save your life."

He can't tell him he had to be extra harsh and public to appease the director, because he can't speak badly of the director to a student, so he takes it to the abstract.

Note also that he calls Bester "Al" in that moment, not "Mr. Bester" as he does everywhere else. Teachers in the Corps _never_ address students with their first names. He's really, really trying to make a point here - a whole onion of points, actually, but I can't unpack everything at once. It's one of those "tiny" cultural points that readers are likely to miss - he's showing Bester that he really _does_ care about him by addressing him as an equal and dropping all formality, in a _highly_ formal and hierarchical culture. (And I'm not sure he ever does it again.) Just look at the rest of the dialogue here and elsewhere: Bester always addresses his teacher as "sir," and he always refers to Bester as "Mr. Bester."

Anyway, Bey wants to impress upon Bester a point about suicide - that it is a state of mind, one he absolutely wants to break Bester out of.

          "This will show them. This will show them." He paused and rested his lambent gaze on Al. "Does that sound familiar, Mr. Bester? It should."

          "Sir, I have never considered-"

          "Suicide is a frame of mind, Mr. Bester, not an act. It is a deluded, contemptible state."

He goes on to explain.

          Al was beginning to feel cold. He was starting to shiver. He saw how his pursuit of Brazg and Nielsson might look like an attempt at- "Sir, I realize I made a mistake, but-"

          "It isn't about one mistake, Mr. Bester. It's about your life. [I've been watching you.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12106929)"

          "Sir?"

          "You are an outstanding student. Too outstanding, really. In seven out of the last ten training exercises, you exceeded safe tolerances."

          "I strive for excellence, sir."

          "Why?"

          "Because the Corps deserves only the best."

          "The Corps deserves cadets who live to pay it back for their training, who don't end up dead or as mewling idiots in a hospital ward. That is where you are headed, Mr. Bester. You have no friends. You run, you practice martial arts, you drill unsupervised in your 'spare' time. All solitary activities. And this is how you've lived, as far as I can tell, for your entire short life."

          "[I don't really get along with others very well, sir.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14264988)" [See also [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14219625) for more on Bester's early childhood.]

          "No, you don't. That's exactly the problem. Mr. Bester, a Psi Cop has the hardest job in the world. He has to hunt down his own people. For their own good, yes, but hunt them he must, and sometimes kill them. His own people, and they hate him for it because they do not understand. The normals who benefit from his work do not understand him either, of course - at the best they tolerate him, see him as one sort of smelly animal useful only for ridding them of even smellier ones. At worst, they fear and loathe him.

          "Mr. Bester, no one is strong enough to handle that on their own, and especially not someone with the mind of a suicide. 'I'll show them!' Who will you show, Mr. Bester? The only people you have who might love you, support you through all of that, keep you sane, make you feel as if you have accomplished something - the only ones - are your brothers and sisters in the Corps. You need them, Mr. Bester, as badly as you need the ability to block a scan." ... "You love the Corps, but that isn't enough. You must love those in the Corps, and they must love you. You must love the Blips you hunt. You must love the world you live in, Mr. Bester. You must broaden your passions. You must find art, and music, and poetry that stirs your soul as much as duty. Duty in and of itself is weaker than you think, Mr. Bester. It can betray you. It almost betrayed you in front of the review board." He paused. "Do you understand this? Do you understand any of it?"

          "I'm not sure, sir."

          "You have appetites, Mr. Bester. You want to show that you are the best, in the vague hope that someone will like you - or be sorry they didn't pay more attention to you earlier. It is a logic that defeats itself, that assures that the thing you want most will always elude you. Do you know what you really want, Mr. Bester?"

          "I want to be a good Psi Cop."

          The blow came so fast it seemed like Bey's hand merely materialized on his face. It stung, all the way to his soul.

          "That's for lying," Bey snapped. His face was very dark. "You presume to know what makes a good Psi Cop? Do you? You know nothing. The Psi Cop who died because of you was a good Psi Cop. I trained him. He had friends, people that loved him."

          [Then Bester throws a small temper tantrum, Bey comforts him, Bester breaks down crying, and Bey tells him the story about his own father and the meaning of the slap, and what that means about parenting - and adult responsibility - in the Corps, and it even carries a message that Bester comes to understand later about what it means to be a Psi Cop.]

Bey doesn't slap him because he's made a promise to Vacit years ago to look after Bester, or just because he personally cares about this one young future Psi Cop not self-destructing. He seems in him tremendous potential about to be thrown away, and he also sees in the boy reflections of the mistakes of his own past.

Bey has already saved Bester's life twice by this point - once when he found him almost unconscious and bleeding to death in a Parisian alley, again in front of the review board (where he and the other adults stepped in to stop the director from ordering a child killed for "treason", leading to the harsh public "statue time" sentence), and now a third time, when he's trying to save Bester from the self-destructive path he's on emotionally. He eventually saves his life a fourth time, when he orders Bester to break off all contact with him, knowing that further contact with him will endanger his life again. (He knows he's in deep trouble with Johnston, and doesn't want that to impact Bester by association.)

And shortly after that, Bey "commits suicide," but everyone knows Bey despised suicides and that he was actually murdered.

          [Bester] was the only one there, at the grave. No one else had come. They said he was lucky to even be buried here, considering.

          "They say-" He couldn't speak, he found - not with his throat. _They say you were helping the rogues, that you sympathized with them. They issued a warrant for your arrest, and when they came, they found you..._

          He couldn't picture it, Bey standing on a chair, a rope around his neck, calmly kicking the chair from beneath him. It didn't fit. Bey hated suicides.

          _I've heard - whispers - that they killed you. That they gave you a choice, and rather than disgrace the Corps you - you did it while they watched. Like a samurai. Is it true, Dr. Bey?_

This is indeed what happened - he knew the director had the authority to have him murdered in the end, because the Senate gave the director of the Corps that absolute authority over the life and death of telepaths.

(Remember [Vacit's ordering two Psi Cops to find a rogue on Lucifer Station and kill him or her](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11991930/chapters/27130080), so as to cover his ass while he went off to Venus in search of Vorlons? Vacit had the same legal authority - in his own mind, he only exercised it when he felt it was "for the good of humanity" or "for the good of telepaths" in some sense, so the telepaths around him didn't object. His successor, however, used this authority to consolidate his own power at the expense of telepaths, to remove his political rivals, and generally to kill anyone he didn't like, so he was (rightly) perceived as a tyrant.)

Bey knew he would be killed one way or the other - he could "take his own life" while they watched, or he could go through a humiliating show-trial and execution, which would be much more damaging for the Corps. So he chose the former.

Again, it's a story about sacrifice - he sacrificed himself so as not to disgrace the Corps. They'd trumped up charges of treason against him, Johnston intended to have him out of the way one way or the other, and his final act was to put the good of the Corps over that of himself.

So what happened to his wife?

This is a bit of speculation, because it's never directly mentioned, but I think when he was young, he was a lot like Bester - he put all his effort into being "the best Psi Cop" he could be. Unlike Bester, he came into the Corps as a teen, and he came in with no connections at all. They handed him a badge and gun and told him to hunt down his own kind, even when he really didn't understand the big picture, or the price he would have to pay.

I think he married for love, and his wife was also a "later" - perhaps they met in school, and got married after graduation, and then the real world hit. Perhaps she was also a Psi Cop. Perhaps, like Alisha Ross, she worked in forensics. Whatever her role in the Corps, they both found themselves "cogs" in a system created by normals, to serve the interests of normals.

With no connections, perhaps he also pushed himself too hard. Volunteered for extra assignments, and for dangerous ones. After graduation came more, intense competition, competition for promotion and for prime assignments. Bey wasn't going to get ahead because he had parents (or even grandparents) in the Corps (or before that, the Authority), and he was determined to succeed in this new life, so he threw everything into his work.

And as his wife's mental health began to deteriorate, he wasn't around to see it. And then she took her own life, and his life came crashing down.

I think he blamed himself, and at the same time blamed the larger "system" that they were all caught in - a system that used them, abused them, and threw them away. (This is what he's actually getting at when Fatima Cristoban dies, and he stands crying over her bed, thinking _God damn them. Damn them all to hell._ It's not just about the criminals who kidnapped, raped and murdered her. It is systemic. Bester does _not_ understand, but this is what Bey is expressing existential anger at and frustration with - the _system_ that allows this to happen (and even ties the hands of those who try to stop it, though Bey is powerful enough in the Corps to break those rules and get away with it).)

He realizes that suicides are a state of mind, and that most telepaths, in some way, accept it. He vows to stand up to that.

His wife's death, he realizes, wasn't "caused" by any one factor (though many likely contributed), but in a larger sense by a _system_ constructed to use telepaths, abuse them, isolate them from each other and their families of origin, and throw them away. He studies history. He studies law. He reads up on not just what the rules are, but who made those rules, and the beliefs (among normals) underpinning them.

He realizes that though this wife had taken her own life in a physical sense, most telepaths he knew (himself included) were "committing suicide" in an emotional sense. They were working themselves to death, with no opportunity to enjoy life or form meaningful connections with others, all to please a system created by, and for, normals. They were alive, but they were not living.

They were components of a system that set telepaths against one another - that passed laws creating "rogue telepaths" (as some turned against their own people, even violently, to try to get back the freedoms they enjoyed before normals took them away), and that created "Psi Cops" to stop them - and who even were sometimes forced to kill them.

          "Mr. Bester, a Psi Cop has the hardest job in the world. He has to hunt down his own people. For their own good, yes, but hunt them he must, and sometimes kill them. His own people, and they hate him for it because they do not understand. The normals who benefit from his work do not understand him either, of course - at the best they tolerate him, see him as one sort of smelly animal useful only for ridding them of even smellier ones. At worst, they fear and loathe him."

(And telepath "suicides" don't stop there - telepaths who didn't want to join the Corps physically or emotionally died on sleepers, or in prison. Telepaths in the Corps were constrained to a very small number of soul-deadening jobs: those who worked commercially died of boredom and meaninglessness in their lives, those in the courts suffered trauma from the people they scanned, telepaths couldn't start businesses or innovate or advance in society. Everyone was collectively choking on laws that denied them humanity.)

Bey's antidote was the antithesis of "going rogue," in an ideological sense - he decided to resist "emotional suicide" by choosing to live, and helping those around him live as well. He returned to the art, music and poetry he used to love, and cultivated more of an appreciation for it than ever. He broke small rules and customs - smoking cigars, growing facial hair, things that weren't strictly "forbidden" but which were just things that  _weren't done_.

He reached out and made closer friendships - he paid attention to how the people around him were suffering, and took steps to show he cared about them, or to help them out. He made a point to try to understand where everyone was coming from - even rogue telepaths - and to build strong friendships with both "laters" and Corps-raised telepaths. (He never remarried, but he did have children through IVF, as was required of him. He never knew the children.)

And when it came time for promotions, people recommended him because they liked him. They trusted him. They knew that he wasn't in it for himself, trying to "one up" someone and get ahead at their expense, but someone who genuinely believed that all telepaths were brothers and sisters and that each personally had a responsibility to the others, whether their connection was large or small. They knew he was someone they could count on.

Everyone had been taught these values in school, but few could really live up to them in their real lives - in Bey, they saw someone who embodied those values. (To Bester, "Bey was the Corps, represented everything good about it.") To the adults, who knew more about his life, he was someone who had overcome significant hardships in life and still held onto _life_ , and as a Psi Cop, he valued that above a hollow "duty," or simply going through the motions.

Life as a field Psi Cop eventually broke _everyone_ , unless they died in the line of duty first, or they had some tremendous coping mechanisms (healthy or otherwise).

This was Bey's, and he was an inspiration.

And he was very smart, and very hard-working, and damn good at what he did, and over time he developed a larger vision for MetaPol - not just what was wrong with it (a lot!) but a vision of how things could be done better. And eventually this caught the attention of Vacit, who broke from tradition (only Cadre Primers in top positions) and made him chief of MetaPol. Unfortunately, that only lasted two years, because the [Dexter Raid was a massive screw up](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13466985) and politically, he had to take the fall for it.

But even after his demotion to station chief of Geneva (and instructor at the Academy, where he trained cadets for life in the field), he continued to have considerable influence in Vacit's Corps - a Corps run by telepaths, both because Vacit was secretly a telepath himself, and because telepaths had considerable authority within the Corps as to how things were decided and done. Bey was no longer the most senior person, but more senior Psi Cops and administrators deferred to him and his judgment.

And that's why Johnston targeted him so early into his tenure as director. Bey had, in some sense, a _moral_ authority in the Corps, and was therefore a threat to Johnston's absolute domination.

Johnston _hated_ telepaths, and he saw his role in the Corps to "keep telepaths in their place" and subservient to him (and normals), by whatever means necessary. Johnston was paranoid that telepaths were saying one thing to him (what he wanted to hear) and defying him or even plotting against him behind this back: anyone who had been close to Vacit, anyone who Vacit had favored, any telepaths who he couldn't completely control, any telepath who carried his or her own moral authority - they all had to go.


End file.
